Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 592 posts

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#361

Post by 8fingerlouie »

It's great idea, though i'm not sure who the target customer is.

Most people who care enough about security understand what this device does, along with actually buying one of these, will most likely already have the technical skills to setup something similar themselves.

That being said, once it supports multiple domains/domain aliases and webmail, I'll probably be picking one up, if not for anything else then for fun.

Is it open to users to be able to run their own docker images on it ?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#362

Post by the_common_man »

paraditedc wrote: post #348
the_common_man wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at https://cloudron.io . They let you run apps on your own hardware - email being one of them

This looks interesting, but seems like their email server requires port 25, or some email relay (which is expected since everything is run locally). Also, it is not clear how it works without a static IP from my ISP. https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/

Indeed, the dynamic IP setting is not documented. But there was a blog post about it at https://cloudron.io/blog/2018-04-13-home-server.html

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#363

Post by kabes »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #350
jawns wrote: post #9

Don't most ISPs ban residential accounts from running something like this? Comcast terms: > use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited t…

I'm so glad to be living in Europe. When it comes to consumer internet services, the US is a 3rd world country, which is kinda odd considering most of the western world does their business there. I just checked the terms on my 300/300 fiber connection, as well as my (backup, company paid) 25/5 ADSL. They're almost identical: * no spamming. * no racism/unethical behavior. * no portscanning. * no illegal downloads/uplo…

I know a lot of ISPs in europe who block SMTP ports to prevent SPAM.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#364

Post by lrvick »

dna_polymerase wrote: post #354
lrvick wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you pay for this EC2 instance, and all traffic flows through it. Honest question: What stops a malicious employee on your end sshing to this server and dumping plaintext messages from memory? What stops a court from ordering you to do that? Even if you disable remote access, what stops someone from adding a new LaunchConfiguation that enables it silently on the next instance rotation in spite of whatever configur…

Well the E-Mail server still runs locally. While they could intercept traffic on their VPN endpoint, the traffic should be encrypted (TLS). However, I am not to sure if all e-mail servers speak TLS to each other.

Well if it does VPN first, then initiates the SMTP connection with TLS on the local smtp server all the way to the RX mail server, then this works out fine.

A lot of mail servers don't support this though, so it would be on the client to also be able to ensure it will not relay mail except to TLS endpoints verified by a well known CA.

In my experience this is rarely the case, but if it is and Helm is willing to tell end users "sorry I can't safely send mail to this endpoint" then I could see some value to this approach.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#365

Post by simias »

kabes wrote: post #363
8fingerlouie wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so glad to be living in Europe. When it comes to consumer internet services, the US is a 3rd world country, which is kinda odd considering most of the western world does their business there. I just checked the terms on my 300/300 fiber connection, as well as my (backup, company paid) 25/5 ADSL. They're almost identical: * no spamming. * no racism/unethical behavior. * no portscanning. * no illegal downloads/uplo…

I know a lot of ISPs in europe who block SMTP ports to prevent SPAM.

It's true but at least mine (free.fr) lets you enable it through the administration interface for no additional fee. It's disabled by default though, and it's probably better that way.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#366

Post by Latteland »

naber wrote: post #343
michaelmior wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hey jawns, great question. I'm Giri Sreenivas, co-founder and CEO of Helm. To answer your question, ISPs block port 25 and email service providers typically reject emails coming from residential IP blocks. > To build a plug and play solution, we knew that our server could not require listening for inbound connections on a residential internet connection. So we set about looking into how we could route traffic to an…

Gray area IMHO. Isn't Dropcam basically a server streaming video to my phone?

Ha, but that's "okay" because it's a big company. They never have problems with being used for spam - of course I'm being sarcastic.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#367

Post by Latteland »

milesward wrote: post #347
gsreenivas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hey jawns, great question. I'm Giri Sreenivas, co-founder and CEO of Helm. To answer your question, ISPs block port 25 and email service providers typically reject emails coming from residential IP blocks. To build a plug and play solution, we knew that our server could not require listening for inbound connections on a residential internet connection. So we set about looking into how we could route traffic to and fr…

That EC2 instance is going to need whitelisting and constant vigilance that you're not sending commercial email or they'll block that port too. What prevents me from deploying a few hundred Helms to send spam?

commercial means spam? I can't use this for my non-spam business? MyStartup.com? A few 100 helms would cost a lot (500*200 = 100k), no one will spend that much for spam farm, you'd do it on the cheap.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#368

Post by writepub »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #350
jawns wrote: post #9

Don't most ISPs ban residential accounts from running something like this? Comcast terms: > use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited t…

I'm so glad to be living in Europe. When it comes to consumer internet services, the US is a 3rd world country, which is kinda odd considering most of the western world does their business there. I just checked the terms on my 300/300 fiber connection, as well as my (backup, company paid) 25/5 ADSL. They're almost identical: * no spamming. * no racism/unethical behavior. * no portscanning. * no illegal downloads/uplo…

> They block port 25 though

They don't explicitly disallow it in their TOS, they just make it impossible by disabling the underlying tech.

And this > no racism/unethical behavior. * no portscanning. * no illegal downloads/uploads

"unethical" behavior is the most arbitrary, un-objective clause one can ever have. Your ISP may find your hosting an email server "unethical", and this clause allows them to ban you.

Europe is NOT superior in any way

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#369

Post by vbezhenar »

jawns wrote: post #9

Don't most ISPs ban residential accounts from running something like this? Comcast terms: > use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited t…

Never heard about that in Kazakhstan. I'm hosting HTTP without any problems (though those are only my personal files, so no significant traffic, but considering that my torrent upload is tens of terabytes/month, probably nobody would notice that). Didn't try E-mail, doesn't make sense without reverse-PTR DNS record, and I don't know how to configure it.
Post reply on HN